Copyright Statement in MIB and PIB Modules

Internet Engineering Steering Group

27 Nov 2002

NOTE: This IESG Statement is superseded by the IESG Statement "IESG Statement on Copyright" dated 8 September 2009.

Many people/tools extract the MIB or PIB modules out of our RFCs that contain a MIB or PIB module. In most cases they remove the copyright information that is part of the RFC. This is against the IETF copyright claim.

People/tools do this not with bad intentions. The reason they do not extract the copyright info is because it is not in machine readable/parsable form, and they want the MIB or PIB modules to feed them into their agents, network management platforms, or other MIB or PIB tools.

In order to ensure that the copyright statement is properly preserved and included in extracted MIB and PIB modules, and in order to make it easier for people/tools to keep the proper copyright when extracting MIB or PIB modules, the IESG has agreed with the the RFC-Editor that:

The RFC-Editor, during the editing process of an RFC that contains a MIB or a PIB Module, copies a short copyright statement into the DESCRIPTION clause of the MODULE-IDENTITY macro of each MIB or PIB Module in the RFC-to-be.

The copyright statement to be added for a MIB module is:

"Copyright (C) The Internet Society (year). This version of this MIB module is part of RFC xxxx; see the RFC itself for full legal notices."

The copyright statement to be added for a PIB module is:

"Copyright (C) The Internet Society (year). This version of this PIB module is part of RFC xxxx; see the RFC itself for full legal notices."